"If there is nothing in your life worth fighting for, if there is nothing in your life that is worth your life; you are a very poor man indeed".

1911 guy

March 8, 2006, 07:32 AM

Heart warming and heart wrenching all at the same time.

4v50 Gary

March 8, 2006, 08:52 AM

To think there are sickos who to this day deny that the holocaust happened.

BTW, from the appearance of the hull, that vehicle looks like an M-18 Hellcat tank destroyer and not a M-24 Chaffee.

Technosavant

March 8, 2006, 08:57 AM

My grandfather helped liberate Dachau (or he was second wave into there; if that was the case, he wasn't far behind the liberators). We have photos at home of the piles of bodies.

Some things demand the resistance of all able bodied men everywhere.

High Planes Drifter

March 8, 2006, 09:16 AM

Thanks for posting that link. That was very touching.

MrTwigg

March 8, 2006, 10:28 AM

My Motherís side of my family is from Germany. My maternal grandfather was a Catholic who had married a Jewish woman. They came to this country in 1938 when my mother was about eight years old. In the eyes of the Gestapo this meant they would have all been rounded up and hauled away to the camps. I never knew this until I dis some research on my familyís history. Iím grateful my maternal grandfather had the foresight to get out of the country in time.

When I was growing up I recall meeting older relatives of my friends who had numbers tattooed on their arms. I canít begin to imagine what they went through. Weíve all had it dunned into us that Hitlerís Naziís killed six million Jews, but the fact is the total number of civilians killed is staggeringly higher.

There is a paper titled Overlooked Millions: Non-Jewish Victims of the Holocaust written by Karen Silverstrim, MA Candidate of the University of Central Arkansas
ď...people murdered by the Nazis during the Holocaust as conservatively over 15 million non-combatant people. One official source estimate the number killed at 26 million. However , with the mass graves at the eastern front, exact figures will never be known....Ē

I was not raised in the Jewish religion, but I for one will never forget

'Card

March 8, 2006, 11:16 AM

My grandfather was a tank driver with the 2nd platoon, B Company, 745th Tank Battalion. His company was the very first unit to get American tanks on Omaha beach on D-Day in support of the 1st ID. According to the reports, they started the landing with 12 tanks, and only 2 survived. He later won a bronze star when 8 of his fellow soldiers were captured by a German infantry squad, and my grandfather rescued them, killing 6 German soldiers in the process.

We didn't know a thing about any of this until after he died. He never spoke a word about his awards, or the battles, or the things he'd done or seen. I found the bronze star in his personal stuff after his death, and that got me interested in looking into the rest of his history.

You want to know what he did talk about, though? He told us about the concentration camps, and what one group of people with guns, could do to another group of people who didn't have any guns. To him, that was the most important lesson of the war, and the one thing he wanted all of us to remember.

CAS700850

March 8, 2006, 11:20 AM

While I was a prosecutor, I met an attorney who, upon learning I was armed (thanks to a talkitive bailiff), told me taht there was nothing she could think of worth taking another person's life. I merely opened my wallet and showed her the picture of my sons. They are easily worth killing for, and in my mind worth dying for.

f4t9r

March 8, 2006, 11:22 AM

very nice
and yes somethings are worth fighting for !!!!!!

iocane

March 8, 2006, 12:11 PM

Where i live there used to be a rather odd little public school. Parents sent me to private school for first to 5th grade, the bizarre little public school for a year and a half, then they just plain bought a house in another school district so I wouldn't have to be go to the local public school. What made it bizarre, lets see, for one thing in the history class we were taught that world war two was caused by a big Jewish conspiracy and that Hitler was a good person. I of course object, which turned out not to be safe for my health. Only 80 students in that school. It was closed a few years ago, lets just say I was very happy.

Standing Wolf

March 8, 2006, 06:26 PM

People who believe there's nothing worth fighting for have nothing to live for.

PlayboyPenguin

March 8, 2006, 06:40 PM

My only comment to anyone that actually would go as far as to state "there is nothing worth fighting for" would be "I hope you are lucky enough someday to have something or someone to make you feel differently".